Minestrone

We were lucky to have a lot of tomatoes from our two cherry-tomato buckets. Here is an autumnal recipe (with a personal twist, of course) of my favorite tomato based soup - Minestrone.

Cooking time for maximum flavor is around 2 hours on a lazy Sunday night or one hour on a weekday for a less spectacular result.

You will need (in order of usage):

• butter (a reasonable quantity)
• olive oil (I prefer Bertolli, extra virgin)
• 2 cups chopped onions (or just one big onion chopped) 
• one chilli (hot!)
• one portion Knorr Bouillon Pur with herbs and garlic (or fresh beef stock instead of water... )
• water (1l or more)
•  3 to 4 large carrots chopped 
• 1 zucchini chopped
• 500ml passata  (best possible quality)
• 500g tomatoes (chopped, I do not worry about de-seeding)
• 1 can of red kidney beans
• 1 cup small pasta shells
• a healthy bunch of fresh oregano & rosemary (from the balcony or garden!)
• salt & pepper

I cook onions until slightly translucent, mix in the stock concentrate, crushed chilli and add water. Bring to slow boil, add diced carrots. When carrots have cooked for 10-15min, add zucchini, passata and tomatoes. Return to boil and simmer. Add kidney beans, pasta and herbs - cook until pasta is ready. Remember to take out any rosemary sprigs before serving. As with most soups, it tastes even better the next day. 

I use Parmesan cheese and fresh herbs to decorate. Buon appetito!

Chilli Rocks the Jambalaya

It is cooling down a bit, but still 'extremely mild' (according to BBC weather news).  Time to put our chilies, onions and last of the tomatoes to good use.  So we stirred up this wicked Jambalaya - it is a simplified version of the traditional recipes, but - hey presto - ready in no time!

Ingredient:

• 250g diced turkey
• 200g diced chorizo sausage
• olive oil
• 1 onion
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 lemon juice
• 2 celery sticks
• 3 chillies (any kind... but be prepared for some serious heat!)
• 1 cup brown rice ('cose it is more healthy than basmati)
• 0.5lt chicken stock 
• 1 tsp tabasco sauce
• 3-4 tomatoes and a can of diced tomatoes
• 2 bay leaves

Marinade the turkey meat in lemon, one chilli, pepper and olive oil.  Heat the pot on high and brown the chorizo.  Take it out leaving the remaining fat and oils - add a dash of olive oil to that and brown the turkey meat.  Take out the meat.  Saute the chopped onion until starting to brown and return the chorizo, turkey, stir, and immediately add the garlic cloves (crushed), celery, chilli.  Cook for 5 min until the celery softens, adding more oil if needed.  Then add rice and coat it well with the oil.  Add tabasco to the stock, then add chopped tomatoes and canned tomatoes, bay leaf to the pot, pour in the stock and stir well once or twice. Push the solids below the water level, and turn heat to low, cover and simmer for 30 mins, until the rice is cooked.

Enjoy! xxx

Spring 2011!

Welcome 2011. After a long break we are back in the allotment and everything is growing extremely fast - mostly weeds at the moment!

 In February we went to inspect the allotment and found some interesting things - like these zucchini plant left-overs.

With the growing season starting soon, we have stocked up and bought many seeds and seed potatoes. We also have an inventory of the seeds bought and collected last year that can be planted.  From the last category we have: lupine, marigold, dill, poppies, watercress and coriander.  The list of seeds purchased is rather long, so I might account for the things we have managed to plant in the last two weekends. It has been unusually warm and spring-like.  Around +15C during the day, but still a threat of frost at nighttime.

One of the first things planted this year are potatoes. Here is a picture of them occupying a large space of the kitchen floor.  This process is called chitting and allows them to grow little green shoots, which helps them grow faster. We planted a row of Maris Piper and a row of Desiree potatoes.  Maris Piper and Desiree are both main crop variety which will be ready to harvest in June-July. I think Desiree was the organic variety, but I am to lazy to walk to the garage to check the bags and labels.

But before the spuds went a row of carrots (Mr Fothergill's, Early Nantes 5) with a row of onions (Homebase home-brand Stuttgarter Riesen) next to the carrots them to keep the carrot-fly away.

The front of the allotment is full of new marigold seeds and a mix of field flowers to attract bees and other good insects. Plus a Lidl (cheap supermarket) budget brand summer flower mix.  Marigold is meant to deter animals and I am hoping that means no dogs and cats would be wondering around the allotment.  

We've planted quiet a few rows of Gigante di Napoli parsley - seeds left over from last year, purchased at the Real Food Festival in Earls Court, London.  Last year this parsley grew like mad.  It was not exactly 'gigante', but very tasty.  In the parsley box, we've planted some dill randomly amongst the other herbs surviving the winter - not sure if these seeds collected from last year's plants will actually grow.  The main plan this year is to continually plant herbs throughout the summer, so I have small batches of them to use all the time and not a plantation of dill or parsley in one go. We have made a patch ready for the pumpkin seeds, but did not get very far with planting - perhaps this weekend...? Meanwhile all the weeds are flowering and attracting these bumble-bees that sound like small helicopters!


Never mind, since the weeds are all prostrate - ground covering - and seem to come out reasonably easy. With such a large plot of weeds, the plan is to only clear the area immediately for working on, but that's still quite a lot! But with so much space, we'd be made not to go nuts with planting food! Every week, something new, and every month a new set of spuds and root veg! That should be a great harvest!

The Last of Zucchini (Courgettes)

It is official - our zucchini (courgette) crop is well and truly over. Each of the 6-7 plants produced many many zucchini and I had to be ever so inventive with the different ways they can be incorporated in recipes.  One thing we did not try though and will next year is cooking with zucchini flowers.  Maybe in a tempura batter or similar - don't have any recipes at the moment to start off with.

These photos are taken in September and by now the plants are shriveled small and frost-bitten and flopped on the ground.

Amongst many inventions is the Zucchini 'Lasagna'.  I used slices of zucchini as layer divisions and added canned tomato, fried onions, stale white bread, lots and lots of parsley, lots of cheese and smoked paprika.  variations included a layer of spinach, cooked carrot, celery leaves or marjoram (from our allotment).

More Onions & Potatoes - Comfort Food Recipe

Still cooking with our wonderful onions and the last of our own delicious potatoes!

Here is a comfort food recipe to use those tasty onions from our allotment - a variation on theme 'Sheppard's Pie'.

For the mashed potato 'lid':
Boil 4-5 potatoes and then mash up with Philadelphia light spread, some milk, pepper and a half teaspoon of strong mustard.

For the base:
Fry in butter some onions (two-three), garlic (much - to keep the vampires away) and leeks (one stem - wash well!) - keep stirring so it does not burn. After about 5-10 minutes add capers and small piece of white fish fillet of any kind - fry till fish falls apart and mix all together.

The veg & fish mix goes in a oven-poof dish with the potato mash on top. Keep the lid on while frying the veg&fish mix so it doesn't dry out.

Let me know if you try it and especially if you find more successful variations!

Meanwhile, down at the allotment, the last of potato plants have frozen and flopped to the ground. The above photos are taken about a month ago. Despite the dead plants, there are still plenty of potatoes in the ground and the frost is not very deep, so we will have at least two more weeks of our own potatoes.

Also, the above photos have our coriander - since taking these photos it turned to seed and we managed to harvest and toast some of the seeds to use as spices. The taste is fantastic - a little milder than coriander leaves if used fresh, but the seed can withstand long time of cooking and has a sweeter/earthier taste. Unfortunately we lost most of the seeds, because we did not toast them straight away and the rotted in a paper bag! Ughhhh! Lesson learned: toast them straight after picking or keep in a well ventilate paper bag in one layer (not in a big pile all together).

Onions

Onions! There were three varieties planted and we managed to harvest all three with relative success. Nothing/nobody ate the plants. There could have been more of them at the end, but delicious nevertheless. So, we had shallots, 'Golden Gourmet', and two types of onions - red ones and white ones. The red ones are called 'Red Baron' and grew gigantic and the white ones are - 'Stuttgarter Riesen'.


Shallots - collected, cooked some, but most tied in braids and dried in the cupboard. the downside - the ironing cupboard is somewhat oniony...

I left onions in the ground a little longer and only lost about two. They rotted away as the soil is increasing becoming damper.



Ordinarily we use very little onions, but I have had fried, chopped and diced onions with every dish. As a dear friend of ours says - 'you just need to fry onions in butter and dinner already smells delicious!'

All of the above shall be planted again next year as it was good value for money. The bag that included bulbs for all three (shallots and the two types of onions) were cheap and a rough estimate is that the value in after harvest was about ten times that. It's late September now and we had onions from July till last weekend!

August

Our August update will have to follow in several installments as this was a very busy month on the allotment. However, here is a synopsis:

• We started digging out onions.
  
• We had zucchini, parsley, raspberries in abundance.
  
• Out of a whole row of beetroot, we harvested 2 and have 3 more in the ground. A little disappointing on the quantities there, but the flavor makes up for it.
• In addition, we invented many recipes for all the potatoes and zucchinis. Every recipe that could do with a spoonful of parsley - got several cups of it.
• It was a bit hard to work out what can be planted in August. We have planted more potatoes, which by now are close to flowering. Our runner beans were planted in early August and now are close to harvest. (In fact, collected a handful tonight - shall steam them for dinner tomorrow.) We planted more coriander, rosemary and three rows of lettuce.

Jam Session - Spicy Version

Jam - The Spicy Savory Version

Various version of this have been made in my family and I have also sampled this type of jam elsewhere. It is like a chutney, except the spices are not particularly oriental and the finished product tastes more like a concentrate ridiculously tasty thick soup. It is great as a condiment to meals, fantastic on a piece of toast with melted cheese on top or as an ingredient in bakes and casseroles. In fact, I buy bread-rolls - halve them, take out some of the soft center, spread a little bit of tomato puree or tomato pizza base and fill the rest with the spicy savory jam and then grill it with cheese on top. Here is the recipe!


3 kg tomatoes (diced in small cubes, with hearts removed!)
400 g carrots (from our allotment!) (grated)
300 g celeriac (grated)
100 g celery stems (chopped)
200 g parsley roots (from our allotment!)(grated or can be crushed and chopped)
150 g onions (chopped)
150 g sugar
70 g salt

Simmer for 1 to 1.5 hours

60 g vinegar
6 g chili pepper (ground)
5 g black pepper (ground)
50 g celery leaves
100-150 g parsley leaves (from our allotment!) (chopped)

Cook for 30minutes or more

I made three pots full of jam from the above ingredient, although I added far more parsley to one pot and called it Mix II, Mix I had more chili and Mix III was not as exciting so I added some oak smoked Welsh salt to it and mixed some of the Mix II in it... anyhow - the sterilizing of the jars and filling jars is the same as described in the previous post on regular jam. I can imagine that it not that easy to get hold of parsley root if you do not grow your own parsley, but I believe the above recipe is flexible with ingredients, amounts and chili.


This volume of ingredients gave us 10 jars, from pickle-jar size to jam-jar size.

Sweltering June & Stormy July

After blazing sun and high temperatures in June, it is now a wet and windy July. We were fearing that our allotment would die in the hot sun, but it survived and quite on contrary was thriving in high temperatures. Pumpkin and zucchini plants grew very fast and potatoes doubled in size. Flowers survived, although did require a bit of attention and extra watering.

Fast forward in July and we have reasonable size carrots and onions looking almost ready to pick and runner-beans, beetroot and late-harvest carrots (Autumn-King) appearing. With all the rain we are getting in the last week, we might have to check that there is adequate drainage to direct water away fro the plants and maybe add some hay under zucchinis.